Having been away on holiday for a week, with no access to emails or internet, I was completely surprised when I got home to a very unfamiliar looking Facebook. Whilst I knew that there was the F8 conference happening whilst I was away, I had no idea about the Facebook immediate changes.

So what do they all mean?

For starters post updates are now called ‘Stories’ and the news feed looks completely different. You have what Facebook are calling a ‘ticker stream’ which appears in the top right hand side of the screen. In a nutshell, what this function does is show you what all of your friends are doing on Facebook – which posts their have commented on, new comments, status updates, basically anything they do now shows up here.

In the news feed, only the ‘stories’ are published along with photos, links and videos. Gone are the updates that tells you when one of your friends is now friends with someone else – this shows up in the ‘ticker stream’.

Your menu on the left hand side now looks different. If you have ever created a list for your friends (e.g. Uni, Work, Family etc) these now appear on the left hand side and notify you how many updates have happened in each list. You will also notice that any page that you are an admin for also shows up on this left hand side.

Over the next few weeks, Facebook will be rolling out its ‘Timeline’ feature. Facebook is changing the current layout to give you a timeline, which should make it easier to share all your updates.

There are many other little subtle changes that Facebook has made. Social Media Examiner has a great post on all of the current updates and the roll out of Timeline. Click here to read more.